I cover demographic, social and economic trends around the world. I am the R.C. Hobbs Professor of Urban Studies at Chapman University in California and executive editor of newgeography.com. My forthcoming book, The New Class Conflict, will be published by Telos in September.

U.S. Desperately Needs Immigrants And A Strategy To Get The Right Ones

Immigration-rights activists stage a rally calling for the government to act on immigration legislation, outside the venue of President Barack Obama's Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser in Los Angeles on August 16, 2010. (Image credit: AFP via @daylife)

President Obama’s recent “do it myself” immigration reform plan, predictably dissed by conservatives and nativists, reveals just how clueless the nation’s leaders are about demographics. Monday’s Supreme Court ruling on Arizona’s immigration crackdown also broke down along predictable lines, with both parties claiming ideological victories.

Yet the heated debates are missing the reality of immigration and its role in America’s future. In reality America needs more immigrants, but with a somewhat different mix.

Rather than an issue of “values” or political sentiment, we need to look at immigration as a matter of arbitrage, a process by which rapidly aging countries bid for the skills and energies of newcomers to keep their economies afloat.

Nowhere is this immigration arbitrage clearer than in the world’s most rapidly aging region, Europe. By 2050 the workforce there is expected to decline by as much as 25%. Yet this diminishing resource is now increasingly on the march as young Greeks, Italians and Portuguese flee to stronger economies in Europe’s Nordic belt and elsewhere. An estimated half million left Spain last year alone. Ireland, which in recent decades actually attracted new migrants, was exporting a thousand people a week last year. In recession-wracked Britain, a 2010 poll found nearly half of the population would like to move elsewhere.

Germany, with its ultra-low birthrate and rapidly aging population, has emerged as a primary migration beacon. Germany needs about 200,000 new migrants ever year to keep its economic engine humming. For decades, newcomers from Turkey and other Islamic countries have flocked there, but this migration has failed to deliver much added value due to their general lack of skills and divergent cultural values. So the Germans — as they did back in the 1960s — look to harvest the diminishing pool of skilled workers from equally aging states on the EU’s southern periphery.

But it’s not simply a matter of a one-way south to north flow. Other EU countries, such as Italy, are playing the immigration arbitrage game by importing young workers from rapidly depopulating southeastern Europe. Milan, for example, added 634,000 foreign residents in just eight years (2000 to 2008), the largest share from Romania, followed by Albania. Over the period, more than 80% of Lombardy’s growth has come as a result of international immigration.

But immigration arbitrage is more than a simple numbers game. As Europe learned through its bitter experience with immigration from North Africa and the Middle East, importing populations without necessary skills and attitudes useful for the modern economy can produce unhappy results. The key issue is how to attract and select immigrants likely to contribute to the national well-being and economic competitiveness.

Almost everywhere in the world, there are shortages of skills ranging from construction to advanced engineering. Much of contemporary immigration to East Asia reflects the need for workers — largely from India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Sri Lanka — to perform tasks considered “dirty, dangerous and difficult” (or 3-D). Singapore and Hong Kong also have a bull market for high-end workers in order to maintain their increasingly financial and technology-oriented economies.

But skills should not be conflated merely with university degrees. Education is no longer a guarantor of productivity; the degree, once a sign of distinction, has become a commodity. Many disciplines have little net positive economic impact. Few countries likely suffer shortages of post-modernist literature graduates, performance artists or lawyers.

Opening the doors to undocumented high school graduates, many with no real marketable skills, as President Obama just did, may not have a great positive long-term effect on the economy. Perhaps it would be better if our immigration policies were less about politics, and ethnic constituencies, and more about gaining specific skills and abilities from other countries, including from Mexico’s growing ranks of educated and skilled workers.

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Great Article! Sometimes people forget that some of our biggest and richest entrepreneurs were immigrants, and the most memorable to me is Carnegie. I also agree 100% with your earlier points on how slow birth rates lead to slowing down of economic output resulting from not enough people around to maintain the economic engine. Japan has had a negative birth rate for a while running now, and I wonder how much that has contributed to their economy never regaining their “Japan Inc” fame. While we (the U.S.) are nowhere near that negative birth rate threshold, the US Census did report that White Non-hispanic birth rate has dipped off a bit, and if we dont have a good immigration model like the one that you are proposing, we might be become the next Japan in a generation or two.

Great analysis, Joel. I’m not optimistic that our politicians (I hesitate to use the term “leaders”) will do any more with the immigration issue than use it as a means to play to the voter groups they hope to curry favor with.

Spot on, Joel. Good Law encourages and rewards compliance and discourages the scofflaw from even trying. The present immigration system effects almost exactly the opposite result. We’d be better off if we went back to the pre-1910 system.

I cannot agree more with this article. I am an international student myself and firmly believe could be a productive citizen of United States. I think the government should be lenient for those immigrant students who atleast have an undergrad degree from University in US or stayed here for 5 years or longer. They can simply do so by making the H1-B visa process easier for the companies who are willing to hire these students despite any major in college. It furiates me how US gives away DV (Direct Visa Lottery) to people living in other countries such as those in South Asia who may or may not possess qualification and zeal to succeed in US; but educated immigrants willing to follow the law has to suffer to get any opportunity due to their foreign status.

The H1B program needs to be scaled back dramatically. We don’t need more software developers, and nursing techs with a third rate degree from Banglor, driving down wages in the software industry. There are enough software developers and nursing techs with third rate degrees from American schools to fill the need, and what we lack would create demand from American schools.

There were certainly enough construction workers willing to work for 50k a year before our southern neighbors came willing to do the same work for 20k a year. What you propose is a poverty program for the US.

I was in Phx last week, did not see any non-Latin construction workers at a large home building job site — all Latin. Back 20 years ago, this was not the case. What are the American construction men doing? Programming? Engineering? So-Called Knowledge worker jobs? Not.

Go into any corporation in American and you will see foreign programmers, doing mundane tasks Americans could do. The US seems on a self-destructive path, try thinking of the American people’s interest first.

I do not think we need more immigrants unless they are anglo saxon norman viking ancestry. Call it prudish. But I am tired of the dilution by the third world. Those who have gone through the industrial revolution understand our system of Government.